A Place at the Table: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  As I girl I vowed to emulate Aunt Kate’s enthusiastic approach to life, rather than Mother’s bipolar one, Mother who swings from overeager to sullen. And I began by choosing an exuberant man to marry—albeit a backslapping southern boy rather than a Brooklyn Jew. Still, both my husband and Kate’s are known for being hotheads. Meaning Kate, more than anyone I know, will understand what I’m going through.

  Though it’s just a little past nine, I dial Kate at work. I know she likes to get there earlier than everybody else so she can read manuscripts uninterrupted. She picks up the phone on the second ring, and I ask if she has a moment, telling her that Cam and I fought and I need to talk about it. She tells me of course, that she has a 9:45 breakfast, but I’m all hers until then. I try to be thorough but succinct in my telling of last night’s events. I am surprisingly unemotional, only tearing up once, when I recount how Cam told me I had let myself get fat. She murmurs sounds of affirmation, so I know she is listening, so I know she is there. When I finish I hear her exhale, and I know that she is thinking of how to respond. I know that I have been heard. After a moment of silence, she suggests that I come stay with her and Jack for a few days in the city, just until Cam cools down.

  “Who would take care of Sadie?” I ask.

  “A kennel, maybe?”

  “I just can’t imagine telling Cam, ‘Guess what? I’m locking up your dog at great expense while I go and stay with Kate in the city.’ ”

  “Bring her to the apartment then. She and Lulu can play.”

  “And take Cam’s dog from him?”

  “You’re awfully concerned about Cam,” she says.

  “Well, he’s clearly in a bad place.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I agree with you on that.”

  “Look,” I say, already feeling calmer just from having told the story aloud, “We all know marriage is hard. We all know that sometimes you burn the house down and have to start all over. Stay married even a year and you know that.”

  “Forgive my bluntness, dear, but if you are locking your bedroom door at night so that your husband can’t get to you, that is not okay.”

  “You and Jack fight.”

  “No. Not like that. I’m sure we could if we let ourselves, but we choose not to.”

  I snort, wanting to say something like “Well, three cheers for you.” Instead I try to clean up the mess I have spread before her. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted. I’m sad about the girls leaving. And Cam’s been struggling at work a lot. And I’m thinking that both the girls having left for school is probably affecting him more than he realized. And also, I only got together with Taffy for one night when I was down in Atlanta, and I bet she gave him all sorts of hell for that. I know she was hurt that Lucy and I weren’t staying with her and the Judge in Brookwood Hills, that we got a hotel room near the college.”

  “You do a wonderful job finding excuses for his appalling behavior,” she says.

  “Kate. This is my life. This is my husband. What am I supposed to do? Divorce Cam after twenty years of marriage? What would I even do?”

  “There’s an editorial assistant position opening up at PLM. It’s yours if you want it.”

  I let out a little bark of a laugh, though I’m not amused. “Do you think that’s realistic? That I’m going to start answering the phones along with the other twenty-two-year-old assistants? That I’m going to move into a converted railroad apartment on Eighty-first and Second and share it with four other girls? Kate, I’m forty-three.”

  “You can stay with us. For as long as you need, dear.”

  I start to cry. I might want to leave my husband, but I do not want to leave my comfortable house, my good, loyal dog, my well-equipped kitchen, outfitted with everything I need to make fabulous meals. I do not want to have to depend on the kindness of Kate, who has started lecturing once again, saying things I am only half listening to.

  “. . . is going through an emotional disturbance that is putting you in danger. I don’t think it would have been unreasonable for you to call the police.”

  Call the police? On Cam? Over a fight? Over a bottle of Pepto thrown in the night? I can just imagine our neighbors coming to their front doors to see about the blue lights flashing in our driveway. I can just imagine the questions I would be fielding today: Was there a break-in? A theft? Did you hear something? Are the girls alright?

  “Look, I need to go,” I say.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m really worried about you.”

  “I wish you could just listen. Be supportive.”

  “How supportive is it for me to listen, knowing that you don’t recognize the danger you are in?”

  “My husband is not dangerous!” I say.

  “Listen,” says Kate. “I have to get off. I don’t want to, but I’m already running late for this breakfast and I simply must be there. My apartment is open to you if you want it. I love you and I’m worried for you and I think you are running hard from the truth of your situation. I think you need to look at how your husband made you feel last night. I think you need to consider how you would feel were he to treat one of your girls this way. I think you should consider being as protective of yourself as you are of your daughters. And now I have got to go. I love you.”

  She hangs up on her end, and I am alone in my house again. I hold the phone until it starts beeping angrily at me, and then I keep holding it, waiting. By the time the line is dead, I understand the following:

  1) Kate always tells the truth.

  2) If Kate is telling the truth, I have to leave my husband.

  3) I don’t want to leave Cam. Not now. Not yet.

  And so I resolve to stop speaking to Kate, taking a grim satisfaction in knowing that I’m certainly not the first in my family to come to this decision.

  14

  Family Tradition

  (Old Greenwich, Connecticut, 1989)

  Mother is only on speaking terms with Kate about half of the year. The other half she proclaims that her little sister is too much of a judgmental prude to have anything to do with, this because Kate repeatedly tells Mother she drinks too much.

  Whereas Mother vacillates between speaking with Kate and giving her The Silent Treatment (a punishment I’m not at all sure Kate minds), when Daddy and Kate had their falling-out—years ago—that was that. At least, I presume that was that. I can’t imagine Daddy bothered to reconcile with his estranged wife’s little sister after he moved to Northern California.

  Before their falling-out, Kate and Daddy were good friends. Indeed, I imagine Mother felt they were too friendly with each other. Daddy was loose around Kate, looser than he was with anyone else. She could tease him, could poke at his pretensions, like how he held a sip of wine in his mouth for what seemed like forever, all the while sucking in, “aerating” it, he said, to bring out its full flavor.

  “The full flavor of your saliva,” Kate would say. Daddy would arch his left brow at her but smile slightly. Kate also needled Daddy about his refusal to eat a fresh tomato unless it was summertime, and even then he was really picky, insisting it had to be from some nearby garden or farm.

  “I hear you, I really do,” Kate said. “But c’mon, isn’t it sometimes okay to buy a supermarket tomato? I mean, one from D’Agostino’s if you’re craving a BLT?”

  “A pale comparison to the real thing,” intoned Daddy, and Kate would snort.

  Often when Kate and Jack visited she and Daddy would cook dinner while Jack and I played chess and Mother drank cocktails and smoked. It was impossible for Daddy and Kate to actually cook a dish together; their styles were too different and they would have fought. Their strategy was to divide and conquer. Usually Daddy would fix the main course and Kate would make an appetizer and dessert. Daddy approached his kitchen the way a scientist approaches a lab: with careful observation, exact measurements, and fanatical hygiene. (Daddy was always washing up.) Kate had an aversion to washing dishes and was forever finding ways to use fewer and fewer b
owls and utensils. Early in her marriage to Jack, she dedicated an entire afternoon to figuring out an accurate way to measure by hand. She would start with a quarter of a teaspoon and go up from there, measuring that amount of salt into her hand, throwing it out, measuring that amount again, throwing it out, doing it again and again and again until her hand was as reliable as a ring of measuring spoons.

  Studying Daddy in conversation with Kate at the dinner table, I knew he would have been a happier man had he married someone like her, someone with whom he could discuss recipes, New York opera, gardening. Jack listened, bemused, as Kate and Daddy bantered, playing a verbal game of tennis. Mother listened, too, though I don’t think she heard much of anything. Her listening was a performance: She widened her eyes in exaggerated effect, clutched the arm of whoever was seated next to her, threw her head back to laugh at the only mildly funny thing someone said.

  When forced to socialize with anyone but Jack and Kate, Daddy would usually rise to the occasion, but like Mother, he was always performing. I never learned anything new about Daddy from any of the stories he shared at the infrequent parties he and Mother hosted for their Connecticut neighbors; instead he trotted out the same half-dozen anecdotes again and again. He was affable but scripted. And then as the guests departed, he retracted his gregariousness, folding his charm up inside himself, the way Mother could shrink the dining room table by removing the extra leaf and pushing together the two ends.

  • • •

  I think Daddy loves me. I am almost sure he does. But he is so cerebral, so private; he does not know how to show it. Growing up I experienced his love through eating his food. Every Sunday Daddy baked, so that we would have bread for the upcoming week. I longed to bake with him, for us to stand side by side in our kitchen, me on a step stool so I could reach the counter as we pressed the springy dough in our hands, exchanging shy smiles while Mother was banished to some far-off room. But for Daddy, baking was a solitary endeavor. He would put on classical music and shut the door to the kitchen. Except in the very coldest months, he would tend his garden while the dough rose, then return inside for a drink and more Beethoven as he kneaded the dough and let it rise again. A monk in his chambers, he was not to be disturbed, no matter how fervently I wished he would invite me in.

  I imagine that over the years many women have longed for him in a similarly achy manner, even though, technically, he and Mother are still married, never having secured a legal divorce. I imagine that even when Daddy was still living in Connecticut he had affairs. He was—still is, surely, though it has been years since I last saw him—handsome and brilliant, a Yale-educated MD who studies genetics. He devoted his life to his research lab, a place that remained as distant and mysterious to me as Manhattan, which was only two and a half hours away from Roxboro but could have been in another solar system for all I knew of it as a child. Until Aunt Kate moved to the city after college and insisted I visit her, I was never, ever taken there. Not to see the Rockettes at Christmas, not to ice-skate at Rockefeller Center, not to see the dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History. When I pushed on Mother for an explanation she replied that we lived in the country for a reason and it was the same reason we stayed out of New York.

  “But you once lived in Manhattan!” I said. “At the Barbizon Hotel.”

  “Well, that was enough to teach me that the city isn’t a place for little girls,” Mother replied. End of conversation. She was only slightly less reserved on the subject of how she and Daddy first met, though I begged her to tell me all about it, desperate to imagine that my parents had once been in love.

  “We happened to both be on the Metro-North,” she would say. “Leaving Grand Central Station. That was back when I was a working girl in the city and your father was in medical school. I stayed with my parents in Roxboro over the weekends, and your father was heading back to Yale. He sat by me, and we got to talking. And I guess I was just so interested in what he had to say that I missed my transfer. Had to take the train all the way to New Haven, where your father bought me a cup of coffee, then drove me back to Mummy and Dad’s, over an hour away. From that moment on, I knew he was a gentleman.”

  Except he wasn’t. At least not by the standards of Mother’s hoity-toity clan. Daddy, the orphaned child of Italian emigrants, was an upstart. Daddy’s parents entered the country through Ellis Island, but instead of remaining in the city, they made their way across America, having heard rumors of vineyards in California, owned and run by other Italians. And indeed, when they first arrived in the Central Valley they found steady work at a vineyard, but by the time Daddy was a young man the Depression had sunk the country and he and his parents could only find migrant work in the fruit trees. When Daddy was sixteen, his father died of pneumonia. His mother, heartbroken, died shortly after. Daddy, orphaned and alone, decided to hell with California and train-hopped across the country, finally arriving in Manhattan, where he was soon taken in by an Italian family who helped him secure a series of jobs, including working as a busboy at a trattoria in the West Village while he started college at NYU. When the Americans entered the Second World War, Daddy enlisted. When he returned home, he finished college on the GI Bill, then began medical school at Yale.

  Impressive, yes, but according to my grandmother, whose New England lineage began with the Mayflower, not “our kind of people.”

  But neither was Mother, not anymore. This was not something Mother liked to talk about, but between her and Aunt Kate I had learned the story of Mother’s other life, her life before Daddy. Three days after graduating from high school, Mother married her high school sweetheart. Soon, he was shipped overseas (also to fight the Germans), but not before she became pregnant. The baby, Timmy, was perfect. Mother, living in her parents’ home while her husband was away, called Timmy her big, fat, country baby.

  I knew from an early age that Timmy died of meningitis when he was six months old and that a week later Mother received a telegraph from overseas stating that her husband had died in combat. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned the details around Timmy’s death. Kate, grim and determined, told me the story one weekend when I was visiting her in Manhattan. I was furious at Mother over something and had declared my hatred of her to Kate.

  “Susan drives me crazy, too,” Kate said. “But believe me, outward appearances to the contrary, life dealt her a tough hand.”

  On that day Kate told me the secret shame of Timmy’s death, that he had died while Mother was on a picnic at Doolittle Lake with a friend from high school, a male friend kept out of the war for unknown reasons. They were just friends, Kate assured me; in fact, there were rumors that the man was a homosexual. Mother had left the baby with her parents’ housekeeper; her own parents were away, at a house party in Litchfield. Mother said she would be back by that afternoon, but it was past dark when she returned. The panicked housekeeper met her at the door. The baby was inconsolable. He wouldn’t eat, he had a high fever and a rash, and there was a bulge in his little fontanelle. The housekeeper had waited for Mother’s return to take Timmy to the hospital. By the time they got there, it was too late. Timmy died that night.

  “Let me tell you,” said Kate, “our friends and neighbors did not look too kindly on a woman whose baby died while she was out picnicking with a man other than her husband, innocent though it was. And then for her own husband to die so soon afterward, it was almost as if people thought Susan had conjured the tragedy. So Dad got Susan the position at PLM—he knew one of the founding editors, a connection he used again when I was job hunting—and he secured a room for her at the Barbizon. Dad said he needed to get her out of Connecticut, out of the gossip mill. Plus he thought having a job might distract your mother from her grief. But it didn’t. She was so depressed. And then your father appeared on the scene, and it seemed that Susan had a second chance at life. Honestly, we were all so grateful that he came along.”

  As a girl, I would study the photo Mother kept of herself and Timmy. In the p
hoto, he is fat and rosy cheeked, dressed in a long white baptismal gown, sitting on Mother’s lap. Mother looks different than I’ve ever seen her. Happy. In the photo, Mother glows. I remember studying that picture and fantasizing that Timmy had not died, that he was strong and nimble and fun, always ready with a laugh to talk Mother out of her rigidity. I would compare the picture of Timmy and Mother to the one of Mother and me, taken on the day of my Baptism. Mother looks angry behind her smile. Throughout my childhood, much as I tried to appease her, to bring her snacks, to make her laugh, to just be quiet so she could nap, Mother was often angry. Her girl child, born to a man she did not love, had survived, while her fat, cooing baby boy, born to her childhood sweetheart, had not.

  • • •

  Thank God I was headed to boarding school by the time Daddy and Kate had their big falling-out, because I don’t think I could have survived my childhood without Kate’s presence. All of these years later, I still don’t really understand what happened between Daddy and my aunt, except that a cookbook had something to do with the dissolution of their relationship. Yes, a cookbook. How ridiculous. It was one Kate was editing. It hadn’t even been released, but Kate had already told me all about the project. At fourteen, I loved getting the “inside scoop” on the publishing world, and I suppose Kate wanted to encourage any career aspirations I might have had, knowing that Mother’s sole advice regarding my future was “that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is to fall in love with a poor one.”

  The book was written by Alice Stone, a “Negro woman” (that was the polite term back then) who grew up on a farm in rural North Carolina. Alice went on to be the chef at an eastside café where Kate liked to take authors to lunch, as the restaurant itself had a storied literary past and continued to attract a bohemian clientele. (“Well, fancy bohemians,” Kate clarified.) Kate also loved the food at the café and had become curious about the chef’s story. After all, it was the early 1960s. For a Negro to be a chef at all was anomalous, let alone a black woman. And so, in typical straightforward fashion, Kate arrived at the café midafternoon, asked if Alice Stone was there, and set up an appointment to talk with her the following week, on Alice’s day off. Alice surprised Kate by inviting her to her Riverside apartment for the interview. Kate had been warned that Alice was exceptionally private, but there she was, inviting Kate to her home. When Kate arrived, Alice offered her breakfast: strong coffee, coffee cake made from a sweet yeast dough, and bacon baked on a cookie sheet in the oven. When they finished eating, Alice handed Kate a black-and-white-speckled notebook filled with details about her childhood in North Carolina.